Nuclear waste train nears journey's end amid protests

A shipment of radioactive waste was nearing its final destination in Germany Monday on a five-day odyssey from France marred by sometimes violent clashes between police and demonstrators.

The train with 11 containers of nuclear waste arrived in the northern town of Dannenberg before dawn after running a gauntlet of protesters trying to block its progress along the 1,200-kilometre (750-mile) route.

The authorities then unloaded the waste on to trucks for its final 20-kilometre leg by road to a storage facility in Gorleben, a former salt mine, with the shipment due to wrap up later Monday.

"1,300 of the 1,800 at Gorleben cleared," anti-nuclear group X-tausendmal quer wrote in a text message, describing the last pocket of resistance against police.

"Those who refuse to walk feeling pain," it said, repeating a complaint of police roughness against demonstrators.

Medical services volunteers treating injured demonstrators said 321 had been hurt during the protests, four of them seriously. Police declined to say how many officers were wounded in operations against activists.

This 13th shipment to Gorleben since 1995 has far overshot a 92-hour record set one year ago.

The waste was produced in German reactors several years ago and then sent to France for reprocessing.

The protesters argue that the shipment by train of spent fuel rods is hazardous and note that Germany, like the rest of Europe, has no permanent storage site for the waste, which will remain dangerous for thousands of years.

They are also angry that a pledged German phase-out of nuclear power, hastily agreed this year in the wake of the Fukushima disaster in Japan, will take another decade to implement.

Tobias Riedl, from environmental pressure group Greenpeace, said the levels of radioactivity in the containers were 44 times those registered at Fukushima.

"Forty-four Fukushimas are rolling towards Gorleben. It's an incalculable risk for the population," he said.

Germany had already decided in 2005 to stop shipping radioactive waste overland for reprocessing in favour of permanent storage.

However it is contractually obliged to repatriate waste sent abroad before that date and has yet to designate a final storage site.

During the journey, activists battled police as they tried various stunts to delay the train, some chaining themselves to the tracks.